I have spent a lot of the last decade in a funhouse of grief. I hate funhouses. Mostly they bore me at the fair but you keep going in and out with your small child who finds the mirrored room a blast and the incessant clown music charming. I find none of that stimulating. I find it grating. Oppressive. Dull.
What the funhouse has going for it is a modicum of imagination. And boy, does grief have that in buckets. It’s so imaginative it likes to coincide with things like middle age, layoffs, sexual frustration, mental fogs, and the soul-crushing realization you’re irrelevant to society. You can’t even find a friend to go to coffee with anymore because they too are weighed down by the ilk of post-modern late capitalism but are trying to pretend that’s not at all grief – they just aren’t hydrating enough.
I am so tired. I ache all over. My brain is so tired too. My heart aches and it tries so hard to love on other people. It really does, but nowadays even loving seems so hard, it’s on the phone and you can’t tell anyone; in chats but you can never say. Worst still, in person and it goes unspoken. I want to be consumed by something or someone, even just temporarily. Cocooned in passion. Drowned in desire. Hearted by bruises. Fat on fulfillment – fucking gluttonous.
I have no insight into anything. I am just stardust in the universe. One day I will float away, with no more worries, no more cares. But I cannot help but think we’re doing so much, so wrong. That we have designed everything backward because if the only chance we get to be free of worry, and achieve true peace is at our ends when we pass the grief baton onto another when was the living?
When was the living?
Gingerly 